IBM Storage FlashSystem vs. NetApp AFF C-Series

Top choice for IBMi integration. In general, it's a very good solution for quite a lot of customers. If you need a 3 site replication solution (HA + DR) maybe it's not the best solution, unless you use SVC. FlashCore Modules have very powerful compression rate, while mantaining good performance: high IOPS rate and really low latency

Incentivized

• Cyber resilience with the new functionality of immutable copies called sfaguarded copies
• With the IBM FlashCore modules it allows us to have good levels of online compression of the information, besides that it is a hardware compression that would not affect the performance of the equipment
• the virtualization of other storages that can be IBM or other brands
• binary replication works great

Incentivized

• The flexiblity of upgrading the flash modules for a higher capcity needs to be allowed
• The user interface for the management console is sometimes a bit confusing
• the configuration of call home can only be done to a specific IP address but not a dns name

Incentivized

We’re unlikely to renew our use of IBM Storage FlashSystem, not because of any shortcomings with the product itself, but simply because it serves a very specific role in our environment, supporting our SAP landscape. For other workloads and broader storage needs, we rely on different platforms that are a better fit for those use cases.
The FlashSystem has performed reliably in its role, but since our future storage strategy involves consolidating platforms and aligning with solutions that cover a wider range of requirements, we don’t plan to renew it as part of that transition.

Incentivized

IBM Storage FlashSystem currently is and will remain part of our infrastructure, which we are transforming from a most classical data center based implementation to a cloud-native version which enables us to act as one of the most relevant cloud service provider when it comes to the german health insurance market. IBM Storage FlashSystem help to transform and grow.

Incentivized

Yes. The last really issues I've seen in the environments of my customers were back in the "Storwize" era of systems. Issues with code updates or sometimes rarely failing critical components. BUT: since every component is at least dual redundant even back in that day real outages were very rare. And today in the "FlashSystem Era" the systems are so reliable and available even during code updates there are no complaints. I think the 5 or 6 9s are completely achieved.

Incentivized

Latency and throughput have been excellent. The compression is done natively on the NVME modules so we do not see an impact there. the distributed parity does not seem to impact write speeds at all. We have found database performace has increased quite a bit over our old hybrid storage solution.

Having a single tier of performance makes it easy to set up SLAs for workloads.

Incentivized

Sometimes the knowledge of the support agent is quite limited and the support always has to route through the level 1 agent to screen all the informtion provided. Then its esclated to the next level support with the all collected data . The logs are always uploaded along wiht the case but still its reviewed at the lower level and then escalated / handed over to the next level if its complex issue to solve.

Incentivized

Very good traning by experienced personnel. I attend instructor led sessions on IBM TechExchange and STUs before as well as IBM workshops for FlashSystems at IBM Böblingen which I helped to prepare and improve after piloting them. Absolutely nothing to complain about FlashSystem training in Germany or USA. So: all good here!

Incentivized

The online training especially for badges and certs is very good but not perfect. Because you can't ask the instructor questions during the video trainings. The remote sessions are good and the teachers are very happy to help. But for some cases there are no instructor led labs available, therefore the 9 out of 10.

Incentivized

I was amazed by the way IBM Flash storage provides a huge amount of storage within the limited footprint, it helped us to replace big fat storage arrays, which aided in the process of moving towards lower hardware, carbon, and energy consumption footprint. We can comfortably say that Flash helped us to host applications fast with a blazing speed and user transactions are quite quick.

Incentivized

IBM Storage FlashSystem is MUCH faster than the options listed above. We were able to remove 12U of Dell equipment and relaced it with a 2U IBM Storage FlashSystem that was faster and had more storage available. The setup was extremely easier than our initial deployment of our Dell systems. Previous to deploying IBM Storage FlashSystem in our environment, we had quite a bit of lag in our user's VDIs leading to a lot of negative feedback on our systems. Since implementing IBM Storage FlashSystem, we've had tons of positive remarks and the number of helpdesk tickets our internal team has received have dropped considerably. We're spending more time on other initiatives with all the extra time we're saving.

Incentivized

I'm using cognos - especially cognos reports - as a part of IBMs Storage Intelligence software to manage datacenters and report storage and overall resource consumption to my customers. The software is reliable and - my customers who are using cognos in their businesses - say that they are very satisfied about the scalability of cognos. I can give it only an 8 rating because of the quite heavy resource footprint...

Incentivized

• 2:1 Data Reduction
• 6:1 Total Savings
• Time savings from 48 hours for SAP refreshes to minutes
• Time savings from days for provisioning to minutes using Ansible and PowerVC
• Uptime has gone from 2-3 outages a year to 1(These are known and unknown bugs)

Incentivized